Last weekend it was ludicrously hot around home – 25ºC after lunchtime – so we drove all the way up north to the Black Isle for a stroll around Fortrose and neighbouring areas. We started with a stroll down to Chanonry Point where the lighthouse looked good in black & white.
Tag Archives: sky
Noctilucent Clouds 2021-06-05
Noctilucent (“night-shining”) clouds are the highest in the atmosphere, at around 76-85km altitude. They only appear in the summer months at latitudes from 50-70º (north or south), when the sun is more than 6º below the horizon. Formed in the mesosphere at very cold temperatures from ice, dust and water vapour, their gossamer threads undulate and shimmer in shades of electric blue.
There was a particularly decent display on Friday/Saturday morning – I nipped out and spent a happy hour making the video:
Timelapse: Sony a7r3, Sigma 14-24mm lens, SkyWatcher StarAdventurer tracking mount for rotation
Stills: Fuji X-T4, 16-80 f/4 lens
A selection of the images are available as prints, masks, cards and other products (even socks and jigsaw puzzles!) from my main website: ShinyPhoto: Noctilucent Clouds
Abstract Cloudy Skies
Simple pleasures. Two photos of clouds catching the evening sunset light.
Exploring Strathearn
I spent a happy evening exploring the Quoig area in Strathearn – the floodplain of the river Earn between Comrie and Crieff, south of the A85. Disused railway line, Sir David Baird’s monument and a luscious sunset. Can’t complain 🙂
Aberdeenshire Coast: Catterline
I’d never really explored much of the Aberdeenshire coastline. On Saturday, however – feeling liberated from EV range anxiety – I discovered Catterline, just south of Fowlsheugh and Dunnottar. Towards the end of a beautiful sunny day, with just enough low golden light on the landscape… I had to fly the drone a bit, too.
The coast enjoys many large rocky outcrops (all conglomerate for a few miles around):
Perhaps my favourite shot is one of the more unusual by my standards: quite a thought-out composition of receding layers of rock, with the cliffs behind casting a huge shadow mid-way up one of the rocks, with Todhead Point lighthouse in the distance – near and far, light and dark, mankind and nature all rolled into one:
Todhead Point Lighthouse from Catterline Bay
Not bad going for the little Fuji camera; having set it to f/16 for depth of field, I’m surprised it chose exposures 1/52s and 1/26s at ISO 1600 and 1/60 at ISO 1000 for its HDR bracketing, but the results are excellent, no noise problems even in the shadows.
To finish, a simple statement of peace: nothing much, just sky above, a gentle disturbance in the sea below; all is calm, all is blue:
Peace: blue sky, blue sea
Twilight
Some more tests of the Fuji X-T20 in low light conditions.
Summer has the worst daytime light for photography with harsh shadows and washed-out pale tones; however I love the night sky with its permanent twilight (at this latitude) giving cobalt blue sky with hints of the sun’s warmth just below the horizon.
Plus it’s more comfortable than winter astrophotography 😉
Three studies in cloud structure – nature’s abstract patterns and a tiny blob of light of a hamlet across Strathearn:
Continuing the anthropocene-influence theme, glorious blue, red and pale clouds in an orange-tinged sky against a tiny pylon breaking the horizon:
The Pylon
Around Strathnaver
Strathnaver is a beautiful area – rural life, peaceful and quiet, where the only traffic jam is a herd of sheep trundling along the road beside the loch. Simple and elemental, a play of sky and land, light and limited human influence.
Outside Altnaharra:
Beside Loch Naver:
Glen Clova
A couple of years ago, a photo-friend and I spent a happy afternoon exploring Corrie Fee in Angus; I remembered emerging from the trees in an impressive bowl of a glacial corrie. In August, I sought to repeat the experience, starting from the carpark nearby, but in my haste to get off the ghastly Forestry Commission track (more like a hard gravel road ploughed through the forestry, complete with yellow metal gantries), I wound up taking a different path. It also emerges from the trees into a bowl of a glacial corrie, but felt different and I couldn’t work out whether it was the wrong exit from the woods or what.
Came home and checked the geotagged images to find it was not Corre Fee but Glen Clova instead. That would explain a lot of things! And unsurprisingly, I now use ViewRanger to navigate whilst hiking.
Still, a couple of hours bumbling around in the grass finding interesting photos in a dramatic bit of landscape on a moody afternoon… Can’t complain.
As I was stumbling around in the foot of the glen, I stumbled across this lovely little burn tumbling its way through the hillside:
The surrounding rocks are quite dramatic – I was amazed at the green and purple hues of moss and primitive plants growing on the crags around
And much as I know the forestry is entirely artificial now, it still drapes over the landscape like a cloak.
Morvern 5/4: The Road Back
And so we come to the last post in the series, a set of photos not entirely in Morvern but more on the way back up the shores of Loch Sunart and Loch Linnhe to the Corran Ferry, across and down to Loch Leven at Ballachulish.
There’s something wonderfully uplifting about rattling along these wee roads on beautiful sunny days, admiring the light.
A Day In Clouds
That was 2017-06-20, that was. A beautiful blue sky with white fluffy wispy cirrus cloud catching the setting sun…
…followed by a noctilucent cloud display around 1am:
NLCs are the highest-flying clouds, occurring at altitudes up to 80km where the next highest type (cumulonimbus) only reaches 12km and most are lower still. Most typically they resemble a fine silver filigree of ice-cold pale blue, although more complex forms have been seen. First maybe-seen in 1885, they only really came to prominence since the 1980s, as a canary for changes in the upper atmosphere linked to climate change.
As I stood and watched the display, a patch of silver mist formed over Strathearn and made its way west along the A85 toward Crieff, so I made a little timelapse video – 17 minutes’ data compressed into 1:
Noctilucent Clouds (NLCs) 2017-06-15
It’s just a week off being the longest day, and it seems never to really get dark at night around here at the moment. Still. While that precludes shooting the aurora, instead it’s noctilucent cloud (NLC) season – just started in the past couple of days so I was very pleased to capture these last night / this morning around 1am.
Apart from being a canary for global warming, NLCs are a beautiful phenomenon, glowing cold bluey-white typically filament threads lighting up the sky. Or, if you leave the camera thinking for 2 minutes they blur nicely with the more mundane clouds:
Noctilucent Clouds, around 1am – Crieff across Strathearn from Auchterarder
A total 2 minutes of exposure to see what the NLCs and ordinary clouds would get up to over that kind of timescale.
And I made a short timelapse – 6 minutes compressed into an 11-second video:
Around Here 5: Subtlety
A short series of photos made while walking the Doglet at some length yesterday evening.
With the scenery of Strathearn along the end of the street, it’s kinda nice living around here.
And the clouds merited a bit of appreciation too.
Around Here 4: dramatic sunsets
Evening was interrupted yesterday by a glimpse of sunlight on surrounding neighbours’ houses, resulting in a rapid trot with coat, feet, dog and camera to the end of the street for a view of a gloriously colourful sunset over Strathearn.
Around Here
Just a few photos of the landscape of Strathearn to the north of Auchterarder – testing a new ultra-wide lens during the evening’s dog-walk.
At Tarbat Ness
Continuing the third day of my holiday last November, having been to the Reelig Glen in the morning, with the weather still mostly inclement, I went for a nice long drive up to Tarbat Ness by Portmahomack. The lighthouse – the third-tallest in Scotland – was engineered by Robert Stevenson in 1830, a stripy shapely construction standing on cliffs above the Devonian old red sandstone shore, making a great classic scene to photograph.
And this is the more immersive view of what it’s like to be there:
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